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racefortheironthrone · 1 year ago

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BOE, the Messenger(s), and the Trillionaires

Introduction

I’ve been doing a re-read of the Locked Tomb - although technically it’s a re-listen, because I like the audiobooks - and I stumbled across a particular passage that hadn’t stuck in my memory before that made me rethink my understanding of the origin of Blood of Eden. Ever since Harrow the Ninth and especially since Nona the Ninth, there’s been this common interpretation that the BOE are descendants of the trillionaires who abandoned Earth and that’s why John is at war with them. I’m not so sure that’s true any more.

Here’s why. In Nona, when the whole business with Crown/Corona infiltrating the barracks kicks off, there’s an interesting exchange between Camilla and We Suffer about the Oversight Committee that includes this statement:

“Hect, what you must understand about Blood of Eden is that we own things in common, we share responsibilities and resources in common. She could have moved these resources at will...but I must make one move at a time. And above all, I must place the safety of...Blood of Eden’s continuity...even above the mission.” (Emphasis mine.)

This took me aback somewhat, because the emphasis on militant communal ownership doesn’t really fit with the idea of “descendants of trillionaires.” I suppose one could say that it’s been ten thousand years, cultures change and drift over time...except that, as I’ll get into later, the BOE seems very very insistent on cultural preservation, so it would be a bit out-of-character if they changed that stance on this one particular issue.

And that’s what made me think: what if the BOE aren’t the descendants of the trillionaires? What if they’re the descendants of the non-trillionaires on the FTL ships?

East of Eden: A Theory About What Happened After the FTL Ships Jumped

So here’s the question that’s been percolating in my mind: once you’re out in space, why keep listening to the trillionaires, especially about the vital question of who owns the precious resources brought from Eden and who gets to decide happens next? There would probably be some residual cultural deference to the visionary disruptors, but the traditional answers of property law backed up by the state or men with guns paid to enforce the orders of the capitalists kind of break down when you consider that:

In John’s chapters (and verses) in Nona, we get an account of what happened leading up to and during the Resurrection: according to John, the trillionaires pulled a con job on the planet with their FTL ships, pretending that a fleet of twelve ships, each carrying a few thousand people (made up of “hand-picked guys” and “two hundred nominated people”), was merely the first wave of a planetary evacuation. As Mercymorn and others worked out, there were no future waves, no plan to come back and pick up more, the trillionaires had liquidated their cash and financial assets in favor of buying up material resources they’d need in space, and everyone else was being left for dead.

These twelve ships (possibly minus one, it’s not clear whether John managed to destroy the one he grabbed before it jumped) and the 20-odd thousand people on them must be the ancestors of exo-humanity as it exists in the myriadic year. But we know that of those 20-odd thousand people, only a “half-dozen” were the trillionaires. Everyone else was staff they’d selected to do the work of planetary colonization, plus a tiny group of people chosen by the governments of Earth Eden.

other than 200 randos who are likely to be recruited from the ranks of elected officials and upper management bureaucracy rather than Special Forces, the forces of the state are not only light-years away but also just got eaten by John Gaius.

it’s a bit harder to pull off the Jay Gould method when you’ve turned all of your cash into raw materials, there’s nowhere to spend cash in space, and it doesn’t take long for men with guns in that scenario to decide that the resources belong to them actually, because they have the guns.

While we know that some form of a market economy exists on New Rho and the other exo-planets, there doesn’t seem to be any sign of an oligarchical ruling class based on ownership of capital. Rather, we see a state of anarchy where there is no hegemonic entity but duelling centers of power. This suggests to me that the trillionaires’ power did not last very long after human settlement outside the solar system, possibly due to a (potentially bloodless) revolution in which the only surviving members of humanity just decided not to listen to six old (white) men and took their shit in order to survive.

In that scenario, I could see it being the case that the collective memory of communal ownership of property in the midst of a crisis could linger among a certain sub-population and provide the origin for this aspect of BOE’s internal culture.

So where did BOE come from?

Well, in large part it emerged as an organic response to John Gaius’ imperialist campaign against exo-humanity. As I noted elsewhere, John’s revenge against those who abandoned Earth in her hour of need is essentially a re-enactment of colonialism - the Cohort shows up with their overwhelming military might, forces the local population into subjugation with unequal treaties, imposes its language and customs, destroys the natural environment in a drive for short-term resource extraction, and then forces people into an endless cycle of being resettled on reservations over and over again - which makes a certain sick sense, in that it’s probably the worst thing that a Kiwi of Maori heritage could think of doing to their enemies.

He even goes to the extent of modelling the Cohort uniforms on 19th century British Army uniforms with the colors reversed, and coming up with his own gloss on the Christianity that was imposed on indigenous populations in the name of “civilizing” them. This campaign is only mystifying to outside observers like Augustine and Coronabeth because they don’t have the cultural context to know what John’s up to (in no small part because he’s used his necromantic powers and political position in order to suppress all knowledge of that context).

And thus, it’s not that surprising that John’s imperialism provoked anti-colonial resistance: when his Empire made contact with exo-humanity, to the extent that anyone still remembered him, it was as the horrific necromantic cult leader who murdered the ten billion and destroyed Eden, and now he’s come to finish the job in the name of collective punishment for the sins of six dead men, and by the way he’s bringing death and the defilement of the dead and the destruction of everything you’ve ever built with him. There probably have been dozens and hundreds of resistance movements - some local, some planetary, some multi-planetary - that rose up and got crushed over thousands of years.

So what makes BOE different from all other resistance movements?

The Messenger(s)

I want to go back a few thousand years and talk about what happened when the FTL ships managed to escape the solar system. While interplanetary colonization would always be an incredibly stressful experience even without a revolution, the fact that all of this was happening in the wake of John nuking Earth and killing the ten billion, then devouring the solar system, and their narrow escape from his wrothful grasp would have added an entirely different level of terror to the event - but also a new sense of responsibility.

Because - regardless of whether people on the FTL ships knew about the trillionaires’ supposed plan to abandon humanity on Earth or believed John’s accusations - they were now the sole survivors of humanity, the carriers of all culture and history. The ao3 author Griselda_Gimpel has a really good series of fics imagining the development of exo-humanity from the FTL ships onwards, and in one scene they mention the enormous sense of cultural loss that people on those ships would have felt when they realized that the internet was gone forever.

And this got me thinking: what if some nerds on those ships had that kind of profound reaction and decided to preserve as much of Earth’s heritage as possible? How would you do that with limited access to computer storage and humanity potentially scattering across multiple planets, and knowledge being lost forever with the march of time as the original settler generation died off and was replaced by new generations born outside the solar system? I think the answer is:

Oral tradition. See, one of the things that fans of the series have been talking about for a while is the implications of the myriadic duration of the Empire, what that would have done to language and culture in the Nine Houses and among BOE, how is it that people can still be speaking the same language or reading the same writing as from the time of the Resurrection, let alone remember memes and cultural references from the 21st century? This is a fair reaction from a Western perspective - after all, ten thousand years ago would be roughly 8000 BCE or smack dab in the Early Neolithic. Surely it would have been impossible for the memory of Earth to have survived that long.

But, as people have said, Tamsyn Muir is writing a very Kiwi series. And one of the things that is very distinctive about the culture of Aotearoa is the oral traditions of the Maori and Pasifika cultures more generally. While Maori oral histories go back to the 13th century CE when Aotearoa was settled, Australian Aboriginal oral tradition goes back as far as potentially 30,000-40,000 years. Oral tradition is not perfectly reliable, it undergoes drift and change over time, it can experience loss and disruption (from colonization, for example), but it can endure across millennia.

My theory is that these nerds on the FTL ships or their descendants dedicated themselves to the mission of cultural preservation through oral tradition, and thus the Messengers were born. And at some point, the Messengers met up with Blood of Eden and explained that John Gaius’ colonial campaign wasn’t just an unjustified act of aggression and imperialism, but an act of cultural genocide stretching back 10,000 years:

“I charge you with...the utter disintegration of institutions political and social, languages, cultures, religions, all niceties and personal liberties of the nations, by use of-”

“...they’re dead words--a human chain reaching back ten thousand years...how did they feel?” (Harrow the Ninth)

Somewhere around this point, then, BOE took as its mission the preservation of the Messengers, which is why they are given BOE bodyguards, why discharging a weapon in their presence is grounds for execution, and why they are both deeply respected and honored by BOE but kept away from sensitive missions and not necessarily kept in the loop on critical intel.

Why AIM is “They”

This part of my theory suggested an explanation for why AIM is called “they” by Blood of Eden, and why Palamedes Sextus sensed a necromantic implant when they “stumbled” into AIM at the school. We know that the Sixth House has been in contact with Blood of Eden for a very long time, and that Cassiopeia was not only responsible for the Sixth’s “break clause” but also was BOE’s “Source Gram.”

My theory is that Cassiopeia and the Sixth, being a bunch of librarian nerds obsessed with the preservation of cultural knowledge, would never have been entirely comfortable with taking John Gaius’ word for what happened during the Resurrection and what life was like on pre-Resurrection Earth. The natural place to look for an alternate source of documentation would be exo-humanity, and I think she/they went looking clandestinely and came across the Messengers and BOE. Somehow, they avoided killing each other and came to a modus vivendi.

I think part of this modus vivendi was an offer by Cassiopeia/the Sixth to provide the Messengers with an improved means of preserving their oral tradition: namely, a necromantic implant that would preserve the ghosts of dead Messengers and let them communicate with their successors, ensuring that the oral tradition could be passed down perfectly from generation to generation. After all, not only are the Sixth House spirit magicians, but they are specialist psychometricians who know better than anyone else how to pull information about and from the past from material objects, and it was Doctor Sex who gave Palamedes the idea for preserving revenant spirits after death by giving them a physical anchor.

Hence, AIM is they because they are a collective “human chain” of all the Messengers who came before them - they have the voices of hundreds of cultural preservations in their heads, telling them of all that was lost with the fall of Eden. No wonder they want to play school teacher and be “she” for a while.

Conclusion

TLDR: BOE aren’t trillionaires, they’re commie terrorists with a fetish for cultural preservation. So I guess this makes the whole war a case of leftist infighting, considered in the long run?

#the locked tomb #blood of eden #boe #aim #the messenger #the angel #ntn #ntn spoilers #nona the ninth #pash #our lady of the passion #the sixth house #cassiopeia #tlt

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